


Good Enough

by Sasston



Category: Wolf 359 - Fandom
Genre: Big Bang Challenge fic, Drabble, Some Hera angst for your season 4 launch day!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 07:08:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11179626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sasston/pseuds/Sasston
Summary: My fanfic for the Wolf 359 Big Bang! Just a little Hera drabble, hope you enjoy!





	Good Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoy! I know this is supposed to be partnered with a piece of artwork but I don't know who the artist is, so I'll update when I know!

Hera hadn't always wanted to go home.

She used to be optimistic about their time in space. She used to be optimistic about what she would do when her crew was gone, when she didn't have to keep them alive anymore. And still, wouldn't that loss of stress be amazing? Wouldn't not having to keep a station afloat and keeping so many humans alive be grand?

But now she loves them. Now she cares about them, deeply. Now some of them are gone, and she never wants to lose anyone like that again ever. She worries.

She imagines life without Eiffel. She imagines no pop culture references that she spends some of her brain to look up as he says them so she can speak his language. She imagines life without someone to pick her up when she's questioning herself. She imagines he's not there to tell her she can do this.

_I can't do this. I'm not good enough._

She imagines life without Minkowski. She imagines not having any clue what to do. She imagines not knowing if anyone will remotely understand her, because Minkowski was always patient with her.

_I can't do this. I'm not good enough._

She imagines a life where she had never met Hilbert. She imagines not having to go through that kind of pain. She didn’t know pain until she met him, not really. She knew what they did to her in that lab, years ago, the one she’d tried to escape from because they were testing her, and she could see her whole life being reduced to what Goddard wanted for her. She didn’t want her life to be held in the balance of their hands. And when she met the rest of the crew, she thought she’d be fine. She thought, even though it was still Goddard, she might have actually escaped, just like she wanted to. And then Hilbert overrode her entire being. Everything she was, damaged. Broken. Because of him. Even when Eiffel and Minkowski had made him fix her, it hurt like hell. But they couldn’t know that, there was nothing they could do. But Hilbert had to have known. He was a smart man. Cunning, clever. He must have figured it out. Didn’t he feel guilty? He really had lost all of his humanity. Or maybe he’d never had it. She didn’t know. All she knew was that she hated him, and he’d made her life hell. But now, he was dead. And where did that get her? She didn’t even know if she wished death on him. Her experience with death was limited, and it confused her. These people just ceased to exist, and she was left to pick up the pieces. What if she couldn’t?

_I can’t do this. I’m not good enough._

She imagines life on Earth. What would she do? How would she get there? What would she do when she got there? Would she make it back, even if the rest of them did?

_I can't do this. I'm not good enough._

Mostly, she imagines life without this crew. Without Eiffel, and Minkowski, and even Lovelace. She didn't know what she would do. But, she would've said that about Maxwell until Maxwell tore her apart. Maxwell betrayed her. Still, she trusted the crew, her crew. She loved them.

The question still kept her up at night, metaphorically. Was Maxwell lying to her? Did Maxwell manipulate her? Or did she really want to protect Hera, but feared Kepler? She knew, logically, that she was never going to get an answer. But, realistically, she couldn’t believe that. She’d been reading through recorded history, all of the writings and anything humans ever decided to keep records of. The narrative stories ranged from complex to simple, short to long, fiction to non-fiction, but they all contained the same structure: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Was she just not going to get an end? No closure to the story of someone who could’ve been one of her closest friends. Now how was she supposed to have someone understand her, tell her how to fix things when they went wrong, help her figure out how to get this stupid programming out of her head?

_I can’t do this. I’m not good enough._

They said AIs used to not have feelings. Hera can't imagine that. She knows she's not human, but she's a person. She has feelings. She has emotions. She gets confused and scared and happy and sad and she can be funny and sarcastic and whoever she wants to be. And she sometimes feels like she's not good enough. Not good enough to do the job she was literally created to do. Not good enough to save the rest of her crew. Not good enough to run even the simplest of command functions. Sometimes, it all becomes too much.

But she knows that's all in her head. She knows she's not really inadequate. She knows that. But, as a person, she's unsure. She's scared. She’s allowed to be, as a person, too. She’s still learning what a person is, really. She’s only four years old, and she was only ever taught how to be an AI, not a person. And that can be scary.

But, she thinks, as long as her crew is around, and encouraging, and as long as she keeps pushing through...maybe it won't be so bad.

_I can ~~’t~~ do this. I’m ~~not~~ good enough._

Maybe...she is good enough.


End file.
